The legendary investor George Soros called from Davos to radically reduce the size of banks that are too big to be allowed to fail transmitted BBC. At the World Economic Forum, he spoke in support of U.S. President Barack Obama in his attempts to separate commercial and investment banking. According to him, however, even after such action, most investment banks will still remain too large to fail. To control these banks, all major economies need to rally around strict rules to limit the risk – how much money banks can borrow to invest, “said billionaire. He acknowledges that it will be difficult to determine the exact ceiling on leverage, but that governments have enough time to develop a global regulatory framework. George Soros called the current economic crisis “super bubble” which was created by the system itself, and was the culmination of a series of smaller balloons in the last 25 years, and unsuccessful attempts to remove them. They add balloons were caused by facilitated credit and high financial leverage. As regulators and bankers were wrongly believed that markets are efficient, Soros continued, and were blinded by ideology that they should always be less regulated. And when the bubble burst, governments and regulators to further worsen the situation by reducing interest rates make money cheaper and thus to the mortgage crisis in the United States, which rocked the entire financial system.
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Plenty of economic news, quarterly financial reports and data on the labor market in the U.S. made investors on Wall Street to take a cautious stance at the beginning of today’s trading session. The U.S. President Barack Obama confirmed that the creation of new jobs in the United States will be a major priority of the government this year in his statement before Congress. Meanwhile, in the Swiss resort town of Davos to hold the World Economic Forum, and today French President Nicolas Sarkozy called for a thorough rethinking of capitalism and criticized the scheme for payment of bonuses, which have no relation to the quality of management. Participate in the forum and renowned investor George Soros, who called for reducing the size of banks. Before the start of the session weekly data on new applications for unemployment benefits showed that initial unemployment in the United States remains relatively high during the past week. Moreover, the data were disappointing for the orders for the production of durable goods, whose value increased four times less than expected by 0.3 percent on a monthly basis in December. Among the most important quarterly results are those of carmaker Ford Motor, which came to an annual profit for the first time since 2005 and those of the communication company Motorola, which returned to profit in the fourth quarter of 2009, Procter & Gamble, involved in the index Dow Jones IA, turn out a profit of 4.66 billion dollars for the last three months of 2009
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The European Union today rejected new emissions targets proposed by the United States and China, on the ground that are too low to prevent catastrophic climate change, forward Journal Times. The dispute between the three main forces of the summit on climate change in Copenhagen darkened first day of negotiations and shattered hopes that will soon be reached on emissions. The EU has called U.S. President Barack Obama to announce higher goals next week when he will come to Copenhagen for the last day of the conference – 18th December. Representatives of the United States, however, insist that the proposed emission occurs before 10 days after Barack Obama was “remarkable” and in line with the recommendations of scientists. Obama suggested the United States emissions to be reduced by 4 percent compared to 1990 levels until 2020 did the EU have committed to cut emissions by 20 percent over the same period. Moreover, the EU is committed to the reduction to 30 percent if other countries are ready to take “such action”.
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